At 12:45 PM 12/31/03 -0800, Tim May wrote: ..
I don't claim this is a "right" implicit in the fabric of space-time, or handed down by Moloch or YHWH or some other supernatural myth-figure. Rather, societies which have taken money from workers to give to others to sit at home and breed or eat Doritos while watching Oprah have failed.
Well, western democracies seem to be surviving okay while maintaining big social welfare states. This looks like an efficiency issue to me; it's basically sucking some fraction of the total production of the society off the top to maintain a welfare state, but doesn't seem to be sucking the whole system down. Presumably this works out only to the extent that most people can't or won't go on welfare. And the thing that currently looks like it *might* suck currently successful societies down is taxpayer-financed pension schemes for everyone who gets old. In that case, the size of the pool of recipients is growing very quickly, for demographic reasons that don't seem possible to change. Also, while really poor people often don't don't vote and aren't elloquent or effective at demanding increases to their benefits, people close to retirement age (50s) are at the peak of their political power, vote in large numbers, and are quite good at demanding expanded benefits without sounding like welfare queens demanding more money for crack and beer. (Farmers are also really good at this, but they aren't numerous enough to be more than a pinprick to the taxpayers.)
The "no work, no eat" principle has a problem here, too. Most of the soon-to-retire *have* worked, and done so under a "bargain" that promised them some benefits at retirement in exchange for what they were paying in. Millions of people are convinced they have those benefits coming. These people include productive workers from every area of life, and aren't generally people it's easy to dismiss as parasites. Whether you've worked your whole life as a garbage collector or as an electrical engineer, you're likely to expect those social security checks to roll in on schedule, along with medicare, the new prescription drug benefit, and any number of other goodies.
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--Tim May
--John Kelsey, [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259
